Hi everyone!

This week, we’ve continued working on our physical prototype by doing additional testing and reconfiguration of our various subsystems before putting everything together in time for FDR. Vacuum testing was performed on our solid addition subsystem to check for any leaks. A vacuum is pulled for some time, and the pressure is recorded before and after the time under vacuum has elapsed. Where there are any leaks present, air from outside the device will enter, causing the pressure to increase. We found that the pressure in our subsystem increased, but by an acceptable amount.

Caption: Getting some help with swapping out our pumps from a Milliken Technician!

We also worked on swapping out some of our equipment with more suitable ones for our project, including our pumps. We hope these changes will be enough to minimize the amount of iterative design necessary for our prototype to begin performing our desired reaction. We plan to test our prototype next week on the basis our procedure for doing so is approved by our sponsor. Stay tuned!